Your presence reminds one of a blind jackal, eternally dependent upon misguided archbishops to provide instruction in bowling.

Let's not talk about anything else. Particularly not the cat.

Sigh.

God, I am a complete blogging and emailing failure. These past weeks have been madness. Firstly, we saw Super Furry Animals in Austin. More on that later. Then there was that whole 'grading finals' thing, and finally we went to Dallas to visit Fabulously Gay David (he and Scott now have *three* chihuahuas) and see Paul McCartney. Again, more on that later. However, I want to give you some fun outtakes from this semester's batch of exams. These are culled from various TAs - we drunkenly recounted them last night at the end of semester gathering:

Betty Friedan wrote 'The Feminine Mystic'. Watch out, Miss Cleo... especially because several students thought that women during the second wave were fighting for the right to *vote*. Moreover, Roe. v. Wade *freed the slaves* and the 'freedom trashcan' was where all the old slaves were thrown away. [???] Oh, and we can give the feminist movement credit for the *rise of exotic dancing*. Yeah, when I go to Heartbreakers I certainly thank the women's libbers...

But enough of the chicks and their wacky feminist bullshit. Let's talk about civil rights! New best opening line of an essay ever: 'Fuck Jim Crow. Separate but equal my ass!' Oh, and when MLK and Malcolm X were assassinated, that made JFK really sit up and take notice of the civil rights movement. Wow, those assassinations must have been really impressive to raise the erstwhile president from the dead. Or the Vietnam war... well, one poor soul was labouring under the delusion that Vietnam was filled with Japanese people (um, OK. Because there are only 400,000 people of Vietnamese descent in Houston, so she wouldn't have noticed them or anything...), and the war in Vietnam ended when the US *dropped the atomic bomb* on Vietnam and killed all the Japanese that lived there. God, it's almost wilfully retarded, isn't it? Sigh. And next time any of you feel like visiting Canada, keep in mind that it's a Communist country. Has been since the Cold War started.

You know, Brent is so funny. I'm obviously biased, but no one has ever placed so many wackily incongruous photographical links in one short essay... sheer genius.

Cornershop, I'm very sorry that only 100 people turned out to see you last night, but timing your tour for finals week was probably a little silly. As it was, all the TAs in the city were there! We broke our 'weird drug occurrence at the Engine Room' tradition, but there *was* a very tall Scottish man who bopped around beside us a lot. I wasn't sure if he was 'flamboyant gay' or 'flamboyant lad' or perhaps even 'flamboyant gay lad', which is even more confusing as a stereotype; nonetheless, he made some excellent moves and sent supportive Scottish epithets hurtling towards the stage at regular intervals. Och aye the noo.

I want to stress the grooviness of Cornershop (whose new album is excellent and features erstwhile Memphian/Hi Records artist Otis Clay in an introductory soul revue-ish way!) - their Hindu-language (?ignorant me) version of 'Norwegian Wood' is very cool, and their guitarist, bassist and drummer are all badasses, and they're great at that 'groovy drone' thing, and I'm all for sitar and wacky percussion being used much more often on stage, generally - but the really memorable part of the evening was how much the support band *sucked*. I mean, *hard*. They actually made me angry! (I did of course try to be polite, because, you know, they're up there on stage and I'm not, but my quietly intense bitching reminded Brent of, in his words, 'an angry leprechaun'.) Honestly, someone they really respect needs to grab the drummer and the keyboard/synth guy (grrrrrr, *particularly* the keyboard/synth guy) and tell them to stop playing music *forever*. Mr. Synth was using sounds that only Jean Michel Jarre on tour with the Scorpions could have topped in sheer bad taste. BLURGH! Look, I like the Brand New Heavies and Morcheeba as much as anyone, but whatever it was on that nu-jazzy-triphop-soul spectrum that these people were aiming for, they well and truly missed. Here's a sample lyric to complete the picture: "Do you realize that this too shall pass/Every heartache's stabbing strain won't last/Since we've all been there/This is inspiring for it only magnifies/The majesty of your character/so striking". GAAAHHHHHH! Somewhere, Alanis Morissette is taking notes. Thank you, India.

Look, world, I'm really sorry that we foisted the Popstars phenomenon upon you.

Also, it's amazing that Madness' bassist could keep on making that rectangular shape over... and over... and over... when they played 'House of Fun' on The Young Ones. And soon, Alex will be able to watch him do so on the new DVD...

Since today is Workers' Day, I thought it was worth noting that the (International) Noise Conspiracy closed their number on Letterman the other night with the socialist salute. How Ken Loach-y!

I am apparently 43% gay. But if I were a true lesbian, I would be very femme. Huh. The things you find out about yourself.